The photographs in this series are part of an ongoing project documenting disappearing places. Three of them are in Auckland - a garden, an area of ancient forest, and land currently used for growing food - and one is in the Wairarapa. The photographs are made in the knowledge that these places, and the qualities of beauty, light, colour, surface, space and life in them, will soon disappear from this world, exchanged for an intersection, an expressway, urban sprawl and an aged care facility.

These places are selected as representative places, ones that lend themselves to what Thoreau described as “the view of myriad eyes … the imagined vision of unrestricted perception transcending the limits of time and space.”

For me, this is a project in the nature of testimony and allegory, rather than journalistic objectivity. It is a narrative told quietly, without dramatic incident. But it is also a narrative that acknowledges that the world we inhabit is not an ‘other’, but is interdependently linked to us; every incidence of destruction, deforestation and loss of fertile land, and habitat for plants, animals, birds and insects, contributes to the destruction of our world, our planet

The first photographs from this series were exhibited affixed to recycled light board and stacked on the floor against the wall to convey the fragility and vulnerability of the places, their seemingly unproblematic disposability, and the fragmentary, collagist and ephemeral nature of the memories they are destined to be. The photographs were unframed, the edges of them left open to recede into the exhibition space. This exhibition can be viewed at http://elamartists.ac.nz, Graduate Show 2017.